Wings Over Scotland

Two stories from opposite ends – or at least, what USED to be opposite ends – of the newspaper spectrum caught our eye this morning. On first glance they have nothing in common, but closer investigation shows that they’re in fact cut from the same cloth. And although one of them is a little more contemptible than the other (admittedly by a narrow margin), it isn’t the one you might think.

The front-page lead story in this morning’s Herald (accompanied by a truly remarkable piece of Photoshop hackery) is headlined “Revealed: Salmond’s forest wind farm plans”, and leads with the line “Large swathes of Scotland’s forests are being sold off on long-term leases to wind-farm developers”. At least, it does NOW. When we first looked at the page a couple of hours before writing his piece, the words “on long-term leases” were missing, misleading the paper’s readers with the suggestion that the nation’s wilderness was being flogged off altogether.

(You can just make it out on the Google page-cache screenshot above, and you can also still see the old version on countless news aggregator sites like Silobreaker.)

Nowhere near where we live sells the Herald so we can’t check, but we’d happily wager you a pound to a penny that the version in the print edition carries the original text (EDIT: now confirmed), even though the story itself reluctantly reveals – almost at the very end – the truth: that the Forestry Commission is leasing some land, not selling it, and that Scottish Government policy dictates that any tree-felling that results from the scheme will be balanced by compensatory planning elsewhere.

The other story is an equally-prominent front-page splash in the Scottish Sun. Under the title “We’re in the mummy”, it’s a story the right-wing tabloid press runs several times a year, with only the names and places changing. It’s the standard-issue “benefit scrounger” attack piece, whose hapless subject on this occasion is one Susan Greenfield, a mother of 12 from Wishaw.

The article is littered with some extremely unflattering pictures of Mrs Greenfield (who, to be scrupulously fair to the Sun’s photographer, does give off the uncanny impression that someone covered Rikki Fulton in glue and chased him through Matalan’s clearance aisle on a dusty day), along with some entirely irrelevant details about the numerous fathers of her children. Making Mrs Greenfield appear an unattractive sort of person – in the moral as well as physical senses – is a task akin to shooting fish in a barrel, but the Sun’s reporter lays it on thick.

As usual, the object is to maintain the public perception of all benefit claimants as despicable parasites by highlighting the vast sums of money the state allegedly bestows on such unlikeable individuals – or as the somewhat misleading secondary headline has it, “£30K handout for tot”. But as with the Herald windfarm story, the rather different reality is buried grudgingly in the details.

Unusually for the subject of such pieces, Mrs Greenfield does not appear to be part of a workless family. He partner, one William Findlay, is identified as a “warehouseman”, and the breakdown of the family’s benefit payments makes no mention of Job Seekers’ Allowance, Working Tax Credits or any sort of disability benefit being paid to him. The vast bulk of the £30,200 figure – £22,805 – is made up of Child Benefit and Child Tax Credits for the five of Mrs Greenfield’s children who are under 16.

(The rest comes from figures the Sun has assumed – but not apparently verified – for Income Support and housing benefits.)

Child Benefit and Child Tax Credits, of course, are both non-means-tested benefits payable to anyone with eligible children, regardless of income. A rational person motivated by something other than hatred of the working class might quite reasonably feel it was rather more of a scandal that the taxpayer forks out billions of pounds a year to well-off mothers who don’t need that money than that we give it to someone living on a council estate in Wishaw whose kids are almost all sleeping two to a room.

The Sun explicitly refers to Mrs Greenfield as a “benefits sponger raking in handouts”, and gets some pondscum from the Tax Payers Alliance to issue the usual outraged rentaquote boilerplate. But to be honest, if it was advertised as a job we wouldn’t want to bring up 12 kids in Wishaw for £30K a year, even if that was all salary. (Since presumably Mr Findlay’s job puts food on the table and pays most of the bills.)

It sounds like pretty hard work to us, and for as long as the state actively incentivises people to breed – because it knows it needs a constant supply of bodies to pay for future pensions, and the only alternative is to set a minimum wage high enough to enable people to save for the future, which is COMMUNISM – there can be no legitimate grounds to criticise her fecundity, even if (as, to be honest, this blog is) you’re instinctively prejudiced against people who were apparently off sick the day they explained how condoms work at school. But we’re getting off the point.

We’re sure everyone at the Herald looks down their nose at Sun journalists for inhabiting the gutter end of the market. But horrible as it is, the Sun’s piece tells no lies. Pejorative terms like “sponger” are ugly and disingenuous, but ultimately they’re a matter of opinion, and the same goes for characterising state benefits as “handouts”. So far as we’re aware the Sun article is accurate with regard to the facts, albeit spun in a loathsome way.

The Herald telling its readers that Scotland’s forests were being “sold off” when in fact they’re remaining entirely in public ownership and being used to generate renewable energy and wealth for the entire nation, though, is something else. Specifically, it’s a flat-out lie, especially when they know it’s not true and eventually admit it further on in the same story. And it’s not the first one since Magnus Gardham took charge of the paper’s political coverage. We know which we hold in more contempt.